Page:Brown·Bread·from·a·Colonial·Oven-Baughan-1912.pdf/51

 of her, besides cargo and crew, a spirit of cordiality and easy comradeship, of hearty and active willingness to make the best of things, that won over into cheerfulness and “roughitability” the most fastidious, and translated every drawback into a joke.

The lights had begun to sparkle and twinkle at our heels and on either shadowy shore, before we reached the Head. We rounded it—and suddenly the city was obliterated, the lights were gone, and, in the deepening dusk, space grew about us. The engine, too, was stopped, the sea-silence fell, and, amid the silence and the darkness and the ever-widening space, the little Tikirau stole ghostlike out to sea. The voyage had begun.

I fell asleep listening to the silence, but during the night I heard from the next cabin a child’s voice, pleading pitifully for the ship to stop, “an’ I’ll walk home, mummy, I truly will!” The breeze with which we had started was, in fact, freshening considerably; and when morning came, and we staggered, those of us who could, out upon a very slantwise deck, we learned that it was blowing half a gale already, and about to blow some more; that the coast hereabouts was too dangerous to be trifled with, and that we were already running for shelter to an island close by.

It was a wild, magnificent scene. The sun was as brilliant as the wind was furious, there was not one cloud in all the great, shining sky, the sea was a flashing battlefield where the richest, most gorgeous blue imaginable strove for mastery with the brightest and most glittering white; and over the riotous waves, and before the invigorating wind, the little Tikirau was flying spiritedly along among a regular,